At Harvard, Mark Linenthal was a classmate of Norman Mailer's and he married Radcliffe student Alice Adams, the celebrated short-story writer and novelist. In 1944, on his first mission as an Air Force navigator, he was shot down and captured. The well-stocked library of the POW camp where he was held until it was liberated by the Russians provided him the inspiration to seek a career in literature. But it was the journey to Stanford for graduate work that brought the Boston native to the place he considered home. "On the East Coast you live in time," Linenthal said. "On the West Coast, in space."
Poet and professor Mark Linenthal, PhD '57, died September 5 in San Francisco after a long illness. He was 88.
Linenthal began teaching at San Francisco State College in 1954, where he helped establish the Poetry Center and served as its director from 1966 to 1972. He was an integral figure at the college during a tumultuous period. He testified in defense of publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti at the obscenity trial over Allen Ginsberg's Howl. He sided with students in a 1968 strike that led to the creation of black and ethnic studies departments. He edited a textbook, Aspects of Poetry: Modern Perspectives and wrote two books of poetry, Growing Light and The Man I Am Watching.
Linenthal was known as a great appreciator: Mark Linenthal Sr. once said of his son and namesake, "I don't know anyone else who gets as much enjoyment out of life." Linenthal and Adams had a son, Peter, who considers him "the greatest father in the world." In 1959, the divorced Linenthal married Frances Pain, '43, a poet and feminist scholar who published under her maiden name, Frances Jaffer. "I won the lottery when Mark Linenthal decided to marry my mother," says his stepson Louis Pain, whom Linenthal supported in efforts to become a musician. Linenthal came to music himself, learning the saxophone at 52.
Survivors include his son and his three stepsons, Lincoln, Duncan and Louis Pain. Frances Pain died in 1999.
